That philosophy applies to the $10 old Sony RTR you find at a yard sale.
However, it does not make sense to me to buy a non-working SOTA tape deck and just "sort of get it working" by fixing it yourself. What's the point of that unless you just want bragging rights?
Remember that I have seen hundreds of tapes decks that have been "worked on" by owners. It's not a pretty picture. Often, the unit ends up having more problems than when they started. The Baxa post is a perfect example: someone thought they had a bad capstan motor, so they took it apart, couldn't find or fix the problem and they put it back together with a bunch of critical parts missing.